What Happened To The Cocaine In Coca-Cola?

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In 1886, the city of Atlanta passed a short-lived law prohibiting
the sale and/or manufacture of alcohol.

In response, a pharmacist named John Pemberton created a faux
wine, mixing together fruit flavors with extracts from kola nuts
(caffeine) and coca leaves (cocaine).

He dispensed it via soda fountains—at the time, carbonated water
was believed to have medicinal benefit—and with that, Coca-Cola
was born.

While the original Coke formula had a significant amount of
cocaine in it, it was quickly limited and, by 1903 or
thereabouts, eliminated from the recipe. This was done in part
because the desired flavor can be extracted from the coca leaves,
removing the cocaine and leaving the drug aside as a byproduct.

To this day, Coca-Cola needs coca leaves to make its drinks; as a
Coke exec told
the New York Times, “[i]ngredients from the
coca leaf are used, but there is no cocaine in it and it is all
tightly overseen by regulatory authorities.”

In fact, the United States (and most other nations) expressly
prohibits the sale and trade of coca leaves. In order for
Coca-Cola to continue to exist in its current form, the company
has a special arrangement with the Drug Enforcement
Administration, allowing it to import dried coca leaves from Peru
(and to a lesser degree, from Bolivia) in huge quantities.

The dried coca leaves make their way to a processing plant in
Maywood, New Jersey, operated by the Stepan Corporation, a
publicly traded chemicals company. The Stepan factory
imports roughly 100 metric tons of the leaves each year,
stripping the active ingredient—the cocaine—from them. The
cocaine-free leaves are then shipped off to Coke to turn into
syrup, and, ultimately, soda.

What does Stepan do with the cocaine? It goes to the Mallinckrodt
Corporation, which creates a legal, topical anesthesia called
cocaine hydrochloride. Cocaine hydrochloride is used to
numb the lining of the mouth, nose, or throat, and requires a DEA
order form to obtain.

Bonus fact: Coca-Cola’s recipe contains a
heavily guarded mystery flavoring, known as the “7X flavor.” In
early 2011, This American Lifebroadcast
an episode discussing a potential early recipe for the
drink, but almost certainly not the one in use today.
Coke denied that
the program had discovered the true formula. In that episode,
Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country, and
Coca-Cola, an unauthorized history of the company (and
beverage), told This
American Life that “only two people know how to mix
the 7x flavoring ingredient” and that “[t]hose two people never
travel on the same plane in case it crashes; it’s this carefully
passed-on secret ritual and the formula is kept in a bank vault.”

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